He stopped. “Professor?” Hayden asked.
There was a quick, choking sound, and Aldiss lurched forward onto the table where his camera must have been mounted. The speed of his movement startled Alex. Aldiss’s face banged off the metal surface. His eyes opened impossibly wide and then he slumped down out of view, the camera jostling and twisting downward in the movement. Now the lens held on Aldiss’s one open eye. It was as if he had seen something beyond words, something so terrible or beautiful that he could not understand its meaning.
“I’m . . .” he gasped, and then nothing.
The guards bent forward, batons tipping downward. They were still mostly hidden, but one of them stooped now and the camera caught him. The line of a jaw, a downy tuft of pale stubble, one frantic eye caught in the frame—and then he was gone.
The TV went black.
“What the hell?” Christian Kane said.
“Not again,” said Keller.
Alex held her breath. She didn’t want to be left like this. Not after the information she’d gathered from Dean Fisk. Not after those photographs of the crime scenes. She felt as if she was close now, as if the message in the book was finally real.
“Are we supposed to wait for him?” Lee asked, annoyance in her voice.
But before someone could answer, the box screeched and the image reappeared. A different man was sitting at Aldiss’s table. He wore a gray suit and tiny glasses that shrunk his face. The man stared solemnly into the camera.
“My name is Jeffrey Oliphant,” the man said in a slow, looping voice. “I am the warden at Rock Mountain Correctional Facility. I regret to inform you that Dr. Aldiss will not be able to continue tonight. He has been taken back to his cell and is being checked by our medical staff. He suffers from a rare neurological condition, as he has told you. Certainly nothing to be alarmed about. If he is able, you will continue your course on the next scheduled night. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Again, the screen went black.
Now what am I supposed to do? Alex wondered.
* * *
She walked home with Keller.
The air was not as cold as it had been the previous week. Students were out now, walking the quads, some of them sitting out on the campus benches. It didn’t get much better than this in January in Vermont.
“Still think he’s lying?” she asked Keller. She was already feeling close to him. Silly, yes—she admitted it. A girlish game she was playing with herself. It had only been one walk through the snow. But she felt like she could trust him.
Almost.
“Hard to say,” Keller said. The snow had begun to melt and the walkways had turned to slush, the drifts pooling out and soaking down the quads to a dark, viscous mud. “I actually feel sorry for the poor bastard.”
“You shouldn’t,” Alex said. “He murdered . . .” She stopped herself.
“I know, I know. Those dead girls. It’s just that he’s so pathetic, trapped there in that cell with his guards. And what happened tonight. Can you imagine?”
“No.”
“Me either. I think I would just off myself. Just get it over with.” Then Keller stopped, seemed to consider something. “Let me ask you something.”
“Have at it.”
“Which one of us is Aldiss’s favorite?”
She thought about the book back in her room. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I think it’s Daniel Hayden.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Look at the kid, Alex. He was never really going to leave the class. He’s just like Aldiss—he enjoys playing these games and seeing how many people he can get to go along with him. It’s all an act with this guy. He’s the only one there who . . .” Isn’t like the rest of us, she knew Keller wanted to say.
“I guess.”
“You’re still not convinced.”
Alex thought, imagined the faces of the students. Of the way they interacted with Aldiss and of the way he manipulated them. A strong word, but this was the feeling she got: that he was playing with them somehow, keeping them going with his promise of Fallows. His carrot on a stick. “I just get the feeling that Aldiss doesn’t like any of us,” she said. “Not really. The whole class creeps me out.”
“You mean Unraveling a Literary Mystery isn’t your very favorite class?” he said in a mock-serious way, his accent thick and proper. Alex had to laugh.
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that I feel weird when I’m in that room. I don’t know. It sounds stupid.”
“No,” he said. “Go on. What?”
“I feel like Aldiss is toying with us,” she said. “Like he’s the puppet master and we’re his puppets.”
“You can stop any time, Alex. You know that.”
She looked away. “I know. And I guess I’m just being paranoid. But there’s still something underneath it all. Simmering.”
“Simmering? What’s this, Julia Child 101?”
She shoved him, felt his muscle beneath his flannel shirt. Felt something else flicker deep in her belly.
A moment of silence spooled out. She saw Philbrick Hall ahead.
“We should study together sometime,” Keller said.
“Yeah,” she said. Yeah? Dumb-ass!
“What about tomorrow night? We can read Fallows together. The magnificent, mysterious The Coil. We can unravel the mystery together.”
“That sounds nice.”
“My stomping ground, then,” Keller said. “Rebecca’s. Seven sharp.”
“I’ll be there.”
Keller nodded and left her on the walk. When she got inside her dorm, she realized she hadn’t been breathing.
16
The next morning, Alex returned to Dean Fisk’s mansion on the hill. The old man was waiting for her this time.
“Tell me about Iowa,” she said when they were seated in the great room. “Professor Aldiss said we should begin there, in Rutherford’s birthplace. Did something happen there?”
“Iowa is where many of Fallows’s characters are from,” Fisk said. “And there you have Charles Rutherford as well. It was always believed that Iowa was ground zero, the middle of the map. If you were going to find Fallows, that’s where you would begin.”
She noticed the hesitancy in his voice. “But . . .”
“Richard disagreed. At least at first. He felt that Iowa was a smokescreen, just like the ‘author photograph’ of the encyclopedia salesman. Fallows wrote about New York City, about Europe. He mailed his manuscripts from European postmarks. It was as if the entire thing was a farce, as if Fallows had deliberately chosen this nowhere place in the middle of America to start his characters’ journeys. It was pure Fallows: the fact that it looked like it meant something suggested that it didn’t.”
“And the town where Rutherford was from?”
“Hamlet. A void.”
“Did Aldiss go there? Before, I mean?”
“He did. He and Locke.”
“Locke?”
Fisk was surprised. “Richard hasn’t told you about Benjamin Locke? Ah, you haven’t even begun your night class, then.”
“Who was he?”
Fisk sat back on the sofa, crossed one leg over the other. “Dr. Benjamin Locke was a cult figure at Dumant University,” he began. “Dumant was where Richard did his undergrad and then became a professor, of course. Locke was a kind of renegade professor. The women at Dumant loved him, the men wanted to be him. He was a fixture in the burgeoning student movements of the early 1970s, wore bell bottoms and love beads to his lectures. I met him once, I think it was in ’71. He was more student than professor, but you could see the genius almost drifting off of him. He was much like Richard in that way.”
“And he was Professor Aldiss’s teacher?”
“That’s right. Locke taught critical theory. You have to understand: Locke was firmly in the Raymond Picard school. He treated literature as if it were simply a series of mathematical patterns, and it was the
reader’s job to unlock those patterns and crawl into the hole. Get right in the book’s insides.”
Into the hole, she thought. The rabbit hole.
“It was as if Ben Locke were tinkering with a machine of some kind,” Fisk went on. “In front of his classes he would cut the covers off his books and X-Acto the pages away, physically destroy the volume so that he could examine it piece by piece.”
Alex thought of the pages Aldiss had held to the screen during the night class.
“I suppose Richard saw a kind of art in that,” Fisk said. “A sort of truth. Of course they were inseparable the moment Locke saw how powerful Richard’s mind was.”
“Was it Locke who turned Dr. Aldiss onto Paul Fallows?”
“Yes. At that time Fallows was an unknown, but Locke soon changed all that. It was 1972. The Golden Silence hadn’t yet appeared, and many believed there was nothing special about Fallows. A more modern version of Edith Wharton, perhaps. In fact, it was Benjamin Locke who was the first scholar to posit the theory that Paul Fallows might have actually been a woman.”
Alex thought about that. It fit with the hundred or so pages she had read of The Coil. There was something almost feminine about the writing.
“You said that Benjamin Locke changed the perception of Paul Fallows,” she said. “How did he do that?”
“He did it very carefully,” Fisk replied. “He formed an elite group of students. A small, selective group of Dumant’s finest lit majors. They called themselves the Iowans.”
“And Richard Aldiss—”
“Was one of them, yes. Of course he would be. It was there, in those secret meetings in the home of Benjamin Locke, that the mythology of Paul Fallows was born.”
“But what did Locke teach them? If not much was known about the novels at that time, then what could the professor possibly have been able to give to his group?”
“He gave them the beginnings of an obsession, Alex. Imagine them there.” With this, Fisk leaned forward, and Alex followed the man’s always moving fingers, the way they stained the wall of the great room with their mad, intricate shadows. “These students learn that the one existing novel, The Coil, was not merely a book but . . . something else. Something like a treasure map. A map that was so new and untapped that no one had really taken the time to puzzle over it. They would be the first. Think about how immensely powerful they must have felt.”
Alex thought of the night class, of that smothering, windowless basement room. Of the feeling that overcame her when Aldiss appeared on the television screen.
“Yes,” she finally said. “I think I know how they felt.”
“And so it was easy to see how they fell into it,” Fisk continued. “I mean totally fell into it, free will and all cast aside. If the so-called Iowans were obedient to Locke before, they were now in his thrall. He not only became a mentor to them—he became a sort of spiritual guide.”
“Did they begin a search for Fallows?”
A slow, deliberate nod. “It was during Richard’s final year of grad school. Locke showed for a meeting one night looking ashen, pale. The students knew that something must be wrong. When they confronted him, Locke told his students what had happened.”
“What was it?” asked Alex, getting swept up now. Losing herself in the dean’s story.
“Locke had been contacted by Fallows himself.”
Her mouth dropped open. “What do you mean, ‘contacted’?”
Fisk leaned forward. Strands of thinning hair fell down and clung wetly to his forehead. He was exhausting himself by telling this story.
“The writer had called the professor on the telephone,” he said. “He told Locke that he’d heard about his group and he would like to meet the students in person. This, of course, was shocking even then. Fallows was already known as a recluse, a man who never showed his face or granted an interview. The photograph of Charles Rutherford on the back of The Coil was already being called into question. When this man calling himself Fallows requested an audience with the professor and his students—well, that was enough to terrify Ben Locke.”
“He thought something didn’t add up.”
“Very much so. Wouldn’t you? You had spent three years digging into one novel, tunneling into it and prying it open, and the reclusive author suddenly wants to see you? Locke was afraid. He admitted to Richard that the writer had sounded strange during their conversation. Off, somehow. Not like a man but a . . .”
“What?” Alex asked. Heat gathered beneath her arms now; her heart roared.
“A recording,” Fisk said. “A machine of some kind.”
“Christ.”
“Yes. It was all very disconcerting. Nearly all of the Iowans refused to go, even though to meet Paul Fallows and discuss The Coil would have been beyond their wildest dreams.”
“What about Professor Aldiss?” she asked. Almost despite herself she thought of the professor as he would’ve been as a student—powerful, even sexy. He would have been above the obsession that drove the Fallows scholars. Something swelled in her, a kind of shameful energy. She swallowed it down harshly.
Fisk smiled. “Of course you know the answer to that already. He was the only one who stayed by Locke’s side. Richard would not be dissuaded. He very much wanted to go, whatever the risks. He is not a murderer, Alex, as I have told you, but he is a very brave man. A confident man, so sure of himself and his own notions that danger . . . well, he never considered danger. He just wanted to get to the bottom of the Fallows search. He had been working on the novel with Locke for long enough, and he craved answers.”
“So what did they do?”
Fisk paused. The light had swung again, and the living room was almost completely dark. The only artificial light was cast by a small lamp in the corner.
“Richard will have to tell you that story.”
“Dean Fisk, please.”
“I promise,” the man said again. “You will learn the answers to these questions. Either Richard will tell you, or you will discover what lies in Hamlet on your own.”
Alex thought again about the small Iowa town.
“So, Hamlet is where Aldiss is leading us? Leading me, I mean. Is that the purpose of the night class, to have me retrace his and Locke’s steps so that I might be able to find what they could not?”
At first Fisk did not speak. When he did, his eyes were away from her, distant and somber, his face drawn.
“Yes,” the old man said. “That’s exactly what is happening.”
Alex
Present Day
17
This time Richard Aldiss was waiting for her.
He had wine ready, an immaculate dinner of stewed hare and exotic vegetables on china that spread across a stark white tablecloth. There were two chairs, one on each side of the small circular table, and through the nervous flame of a candle Alex watched the professor smile at her in the half darkness of his little kitchen. At her place setting was an envelope that read, To Alexandra. She had refused to open it.
“Poor Michael Tanner,” the man said when they were seated.
“They’re still searching,” Alex said. “The police have been watching Sally, but they haven’t charged her with anything yet.”
“And is it your opinion that quiet Sally killed her husband?” he asked bluntly. He tore at the rabbit with his fork, a tortured smile stretched across his face.
“No.” The word out there, she drew herself quickly back. “I don’t know.”
“ ‘No,’ ” the professor repeated in a perfect imitation of her voice. “ ‘I don’t know.’ Which is it, Alexandra?”
“I haven’t had time to observe them all yet.” She took a cautious bite. It was luxurious, but she refused to show Aldiss her pleasure. “But I will. They’re staying in Dean Fisk’s—”
“Fisk,” spat Aldiss. “Has the old man trotted out his mythical manuscript yet?” Aldiss laughed, but his eyes didn’t leave her. Alex looked off into the shadows of the kitchen. “Give me s
omething of substance.”
Alex looked at him through the candle’s flame. Bastard. “I saw the house.”
The smile curled upward. He rested his fork on the plate with a gentle tink, steepled his hands beneath his chin. “Go on.”
“You said before that you felt that the person who did this was someone who knew Michael.”
Aldiss nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I think you may have been right.”
“Of course I was,” he said. His hands moved. She watched his fingers dance from glass to knife to cloth and then back again. Glass, knife, cloth. His heart was racing, his mind whirling. She knew it. “You were describing Michael Tanner’s house.”
But Alex didn’t continue. She could feel the balance of power shifting ineluctably away from her, and she couldn’t let that happen. Not again.
“Your turn, Professor,” she said, her gaze steady on him. “Were you in touch with Daniel Hayden before his death?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aldiss said. But it was too quick, too abrupt. “I am not interested in the past, Alexandra. I could fall silent right now. I could close myself like a book and end this lesson, and where would you turn then? To your hapless detective? To your conspiracy-theorist friends?”
She glared at him, heart thudding. Finally she nodded and said, “It was Dumant. Michael’s house, the crime scene—everything was the same except the kitchen.”
Aldiss went still, looked up at her quizzically.
“There were dishes all over the floor. They had been broken, pulled from the table and strewn across the room. Shards of glass everywhere. The chairs had been toppled and there were marks across the walls.”
Aldiss thought. Then he said, “How many plates?”
“What?”
The professor sighed. “An easy question, Alexandra. How many plates were there?”
She tried to remember the kitchen, the strewn glass. But it was futile. She could remember nothing but the library, the books, the awful silence of the place—
“I don’t know,” she said shamefully. “I can’t remember.”
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